Your Running Plan Is Useless If It Can’t Do This

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Most running plans look great on day one.

Then real life happens.

You miss a session. Work gets busy. Your long run goes badly. You pick up a niggle. You race harder than planned.

And the plan just carries on like nothing happened.

That’s the problem.

In this video, I explain why a good running plan isn’t just a list of workouts… it’s a decision-making system. I’ll show you what your training plan actually needs to do if you want to improve without getting cooked, injured, or stuck in that horrible grey area where every run feels harder than it should.

We’ll cover:

Why workouts are less important than decisions
 Why missed sessions should not always be “made up”
 How race priority changes the plan
 Why consistency beats perfection
 How MaxMile is being built to give runners smarter, more responsive coaching

Right, that's us done. If that was useful… share it. Stick it in your club WhatsApp, send it to that mate who's always getting injured three weeks before race day. You know the one ;)

If you want to go deeper on any of this, Nick puts out videos every week on YouTube, and the entire team of coaches are sharing helpful tips on their instagram channels... links below. And if you're thinking you actually need a proper plan and someone in your corner… we've got Guided Coaching from 97 quid a month, right up to full one-to-one coaching with the coach of your choice. Either way, maximummileagecoaching.com is where you want to be.

See you on the next one.

To work with us - https://join.maximummileagecoaching.com/home-page-9835

Nick's YT - youtube.com/channel/UCgdIPeN3bF7I7-tcspyFbVg/

Faye's IG - https://www.instagram.com/fayejohnsoncoaching/

Rachael's IG - https://www.instagram.com/rachforthelongrun/

Hannah's IG - https://www.instagram.com/coach_hannah_witt/

Matt's IG - https://www.instagram.com/ultracoachmatt/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Look, here is the best advice first. If your training plan doesn't change when your life changes, it is not coaching. It is just a calendar with delusions of grandeur. Because we and I I know that sounds a bit harsh, but just stay with me because this is where so many runners get caught out. They download an app, they put in a goal race, they get a lovely looking plan, they see all the little workouts neatly lined up in a row. And for about five minutes, it feels brilliant. Then real life happens. You miss Monday's run. Work goes mental. You bring the kids home with some Victorian disease from school. Your long run turns into a real battle. You get a niggle in your calf. Your it just life happens, right? You race a half marathon that was supposed to be just a tune-up, but you absolutely buried yourself because well, obviously, there was someone in a vest you didn't like the look of, or you know, there was that guy from running club that you fancied having a cracker beating, and then the plan just carries on like nothing happened. That is part of the problem. Not the plan was bad on day one, but it didn't know what to do on day eight, it didn't know that things were going to change, and well, I say all the time, a plan is only as good as the day it was written. And that is what I want to talk to you about today, because a good running plan is not a list of workouts, it is not a sheet of paper that just has some pretty colours on it. A good running plan is a decision-making system. I'm Nick Hancock from Maximum Mileage Coaching, and I coach everything from 5K up to ultra runner, usually people who have got big goals but they've got busy lives too. They have absolutely no interest in being told to just run more by someone on the internet. And in this video, I am going to show you the five things that you can do with your training, with your training plan, and what it needs to do if you actually want it to work in the real world, because that's what we live in, right? It's not some fantasy world where you know we sleep exactly eight hours every night, we hit every session perfectly, we eat like some monk and never have that weird pain in your left ankle. The real world, the one we actually live in. So, number one, your plan needs to know the difference between a workout and a decision. Most plans are built around workouts. Monday easy, Tuesday intervals, Friday tempo, Sunday long run, lovely. But the workout itself is not the clever bit. The clever bit is why that workout has been put there. Why today? Why that intensity? Why that duration? Why now at this particular point in my training? Why after what you did last week? Why with that race that you've got coming up? And this is where a lot of generic plans fall down. They can prescribe, but they don't really decide. For example, a workout says, do 6x3 minutes hard. A coaching decision says you've had a heavy week, your long run was a little harder than expected, and your A race is still 10 weeks away. So we're not going to force that VO2 max work today. We are going to dial it down a little bit, we're still going to keep some quality in there. We'll keep it aerobic, we'll add in some strides, and we will protect the bigger picture. That is coaching. And it sounds simple, but it's actually not because the best session is not always the hardest session. The best session is the one that moves you forward without stealing from the next three sessions. That's the bit people miss protecting the work to come. They judge the plan by how exciting the workouts look. They saw some influencer or some athlete do some mega workout on the internet. I judge the plan by whether the athlete is still absorbing the training four, six, eight weeks later. Stick number two, your plan needs to respond to what actually happened. Here's the classic one: you miss a session. Maybe Monday was supposed to be an easy one, but you didn't do it. So what happens? Most runners do one of three things, I find. They cram it in the next day, they add it on top of the run that they've already got, they panic and try to catch up, or they ignore it, but they feel guilty all week. And all three can be wrong depending on the context. Because missing a 30-minute easy run is not the same as missing your key long run. Missing a string session because you were lazy is not the same as skipping it because your back felt a bit dodgy. Missing a session in base phase is not the same as missing a race-specific marathon workout four weeks out from race day. So the question is not can I move this run? The question is what does moving this run do to the rest of the week? Because this is where athletes accidentally create problems for themselves. They don't get injured because one session was wrong, they get injured because five reasonable decisions stacked together become a stupid week. Tuesday becomes Wednesday, Wednesday becomes Thursday, Thursday's rest disappears, Friday's session stays in, Sunday's long run stays in, and suddenly you've built a week that looks like it was designed by someone who hates the Achilles tendon. And I say that with love because we have all done it. And I still look at my own training sometimes and go, oh, I missed yesterday. I really should catch up. But a proper plan needs to look at the whole week. Not just can we squeeze this in? But should we? Like the the question is, should we? Step number three: your plan needs to understand race priority. This is massive. Not every goal, uh sorry, not every race is the goal. Some races are A races, and we need those A races to be able to plan our training properly. Some are B races, some are C races, and some are just I signed up because my mate did, and now I'm pretending it's part of the plan. Which is fine, by the way. Racing is fun. You should race, I recommend it. But your plan needs to know the difference. Because if you treat every race like the main event, your training becomes chaos, you try sharpening for everything, you taper for everything, you have to recover from everything, and then you wonder why you're never building proper momentum. So let's say your A race is a marathon in uh in 12 weeks' time, but you've got a half marathon in three weeks. A poor plan might go, half marathon coming up, better sharpen up. A better plan asks, is this half marathon the goal, or is it serving the marathon in 12 weeks' time? That one question changes absolutely everything. If it's a B race, maybe we use it as a as a controlled hard effort. If it's a C race, maybe we just train through it. If it's genuinely the A race, then we taper properly, we build properly. Same event, different decisions along the way. That's the people, that's the bit that people don't get from a from a static plan. And it matters even more for marathon and ultramarathon runners because if you've got a 50k and a 100k and a random trail marathon in the diary, the plan needs to understand the terrain, the elevation, the recovery cost, and what actually deserves priority. And speaking of terrain, my dog is digging. Dotty! No. Sorry about that. Uh wae, wae, we so otherwise you end up with road runner workouts for a mountain race or speed sessions when what you really need is durability, climbing, strength, downhill tolerance, fueling practice, all of that stuff. Step number four. So your plan needs to have your actual coaching, training, philosophy baked in. And this is where I'll I'll break the fourth wall for a second because this is one of the this is one of the reasons that I've been building the Maxmile app. Not because the world needs another running app, it really doesn't. There are enough running apps out there. The world has enough apps that can tell you to do intervals on a Tuesday. The problem that I am trying to solve with Max Mile app is different. It's how do you take proper coaching judgment? The kind of judgment that says, no, we're not going to do two hard days back to back, because that's really stupid. Or, yes, you can increase the long run here because your your training maturity, as I call it, your lifetime mileage supports the ability to be able to do that. Or no, we're not throwing marathon pace into every long run because I don't want you overcooked by week 12. Or you need to keep strength work, but we're gonna keep it nice and repeatable because performance comes from consistency, not from circus tricks. And how do you put that into a system that actually helps more runners? Because that's the difference. A plan generator says, here's a workout, a coaching system says, here is the right workout for you, in the right place for you, for the right reason for you, with the right level of risk for you. And if you're watching this thinking, yeah, but I don't need AI, I just need a spreadsheet. Maybe. If your life is simple, your training is stable, you know how to interpret fatigue, you understand progression, you can manage your own race priorities, and you don't lie to yourself after a bad session, then yeah, the spreadsheet might be fine. You crack on, but most runners don't fail because they lack the motivation. They lack because they make poor decisions and poor adjustments. I'm a coach and I do that to myself. I'm great with coaching other people, but doing it to myself, oh yeah, talk about gaslighting yourself. I turn, I do, and people do this, they turn small problems into big problems. They force sessions that that should be softened, they ignore feedback until it becomes an injury. They train hard enough to be tired, but not intelligently enough to adapt. And that is the gap. That is the gap that I'm trying to address with the Max Mile app. And this is exactly why we have built the Max Mile app in the way that we have. Not just as a replacement, not as a replacement for coaching judgment, but as a way to give runners a smarter training environment, a plan that is based on your goal, your races, your experience, your training history, and crucially your feedback. It's not just data and numbers, it is actual subjective feedback where you can talk to the coach within the app. It's a place where the session has a purpose, not just a pace range. It's a system that connects all of the dots between what was planned, what actually happened, and then what should happen next. Exactly the kind of decisions I make in human-to-human coaching. So if you want to try it, the link is below in the description. Start with a free plan. It's completely free. Have a look around, connect your watch, see how different it feels when the plan is built around you rather than around some imaginary perfect runner. Anyway, back to back to the useful bit. So, step number five: your plan needs to protect consistency, not chase perfection. This is the bit I really want you to take away. The goal of training is not to complete the plan that's been set out for you perfectly. The goal is to become fitter, and those are not always the same thing. Sometimes becoming fitter means pushing harder, sometimes it means backing off, sometimes it means swapping a session, sometimes it means binning a run entirely and not being not being traumatic about it, not you know, gaslighting yourself. I've said gaslighting twice in this video now. Don't gaslight yourself. You know, I have coached athletes who have had brilliant marathon builds where on paper it didn't all go to plan. Like take Brianie, who who I coach. She her dream was a sub-3 marathon, and we got her from 317 to 257 on a course that wasn't ideal for a PB. And her training wasn't perfect. But we missed the right things, we didn't panic, we didn't try to win training, we didn't turn every adjustment into some crisis. And then I've seen other runners that will hit every session they get to, but they get to race week absolutely smashed. I wonder why the wheels came off at mile 18. Because completion is not adaptation. A green box on your calendar does not mean that your body absorbed the work. And that is a really important distinction. Your body doesn't care whether the session was scheduled, your body doesn't care about the stress you applied, the recovery that you allowed, and whether that pattern was repeated consistently enough to create that change. That's why a good plan has to be flexible without being flimsy. And there's a big difference. Flexible means that the plan adapts to the reality of our situation. Flimsy means that you change everything based on your mood. I've been there. But that is where coaching comes in. So a little practical test. Have a little look at your your current plan. Here's something that you can do today. Open your current training plan and ask five questions. Does this plan know what I did last week? Not what I was not what I was supposed to do. What I actually did. That's what you need to think about. Question number two. Does it know which race matters the most to me? Question number three. Does it change when I miss a session? Or does it just guilt trip me with a red box? Question number four, does it explain why sessions are there? Not just what to run, not just oh go and do you know an hour of hill repeats? Like why? Why am I doing these hill repeats? What is the purpose of these hill reads, hill repeats? And then question number five, does it protect the next session, the next few days? Because that is the biggest one. A good Tuesday workout should not ruin Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Training is a chain. If one link is too heavy, then everything else bends. Now, I can already hear someone saying, But Nick, people have run fast for years using static plans. Yes, of course they have. People have also run fast while doing all sorts of ridiculous stuff. But that doesn't make it optimal. A static plan can work if the athlete understands how to adapt it. But that's the key phrase. If the athlete understands how to adapt it, but most don't. And that is not because they're stupid, it's because it's hard to coach yourself. I've said it a few times in this video. It is really hard to coach yourself. Some of the best coaches in the world don't coach themselves, they have their own coaches. You are you're too close to it, you're emotionally attached, you want the goal, you want to believe that you can handle more. And sometimes you need the plan, the system, or this or the coach to go, no, not today. Think of the bigger picture, and that one decision can save an entire training block. So, quick recap: your running plan needs to do five things. It needs to make decisions, not just give you a list of workouts. It needs to respond to what actually happened, it needs to understand your priorities, your racing priorities. It needs to have a clear coaching philosophy behind it, and it needs to protect consistency, not completely chase perfection. Because the best plan is not the one that looks most impressive on paper, it's the one that you personally can absorb, adapt from, and keep building on. So, again, if you want to try the Max Mile app, the link is below in the description. And in the next video, I am going to show you the exact mistake that most runners make when they miss a session and why just move it to tomorrow can absolutely destroy your week.